It might be a funny intersection of interests. But developer Matt Greenwood built a macOS-native clone of the legendary Winamp in Swift, MIT-licensed, with MP3 and FLAC playback and Milkdrop visualization support (including fullscreen). Updated: it’s back! Update: or not!
The project has returned. I’m looking into other macOS Winamp-style players, though, including those with theme support. (Yes, it’s a thing!) One such option is re:AMP, which, yes, lives on a .ru TLD, but it does have a Brew cask.
I still have not quite found the perfect Mac MP3 player that can live up to the glory days of iTunes/SoundJam MP and Audion. There’s the excellent IINA, which just shipped full plug-in support, and comes close (with QuickTime Pro video vibes, too). Lately, I’ve just been using foobar2000, which is probably your best cross-platform solution. (Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android versions are available, too.) I’m sure I’ll get around to properly organizing this on some rainy/snowy day soon.
But meanwhile, this is just a nostalgic buzz, especially with Milkdrop running. What we really need, of course, is full skin support, but this is free and fun anyway. And if you’re curious how this would look in Swift, you can poke around the code.
Features:
- 🎵 MP3 and FLAC playback support
- 🎨 Winamp-inspired UI
- 📝 Playlist management / M3U
- ⏯️ Full playback controls (play, pause, stop, next, previous)
- 📊 Spectrum analyzer visualization
- 🎚️ 10-band equalizer
- 🔍 File browser with drag-and-drop support
- Multiple oscilloscope visualizations
- Milkdrop (click on the icon in the main app) – supports fullscreen mode
- Lyrics overlay in Milkdrop
Download/code:
https://github.com/mgreenwood1001/winamp
This is Mac-only, yes, but it could be ported — and the license allows that. Swift now does run on Linux, though I know there’s been criticism of the way Apple has handled that. This could be a decent test case if you wanted to mess around.
Now, what’s your current music player of choice? If you say Spotify, you’re banished forever.
Prefer Winamp in a browser? Here you go:
Do check out IINA, as it has some other capabilities and funny enough is also written in Swift (though plug-ins use JavaScript):
Previously in Milkdrop-on-Mac news: